My Digital Storytelling Experience

Whew! I thought this project would be fairly simple and would not take much time. Was I surprised! I created a movie to help teach my kindergarten students about some of the symbols of America. My first mistake was that I didn't know I needed to use copyright free pictures and music. Therefore, I had to redo what I had assembled for this project. I had trouble finding quality pictures to support my topic that were copyright free. I also struggled to find a song that was copyright free. However, once I found those resources, the movie itself was not so difficult to create. I typed what I wanted to say about each of my pictures before recording for my narration. This helped ensure that I would say the right thing and would limit the times I needed to re-record my narration. I liked how simple it was to click and drag my narration and to extend or shorten pictures so that the narration and pictures lined up perfectly. I also thought it was neat how you could cut songs and/or videos to only use what you needed at that particular spot in the movie. The only difficult part after that was saving properly to the UWG server. Thank goodness I had Dr. B. and a friend to help with that! While I loved the end result, I feel my kindergarten students would not be able to create movies on their own. It would be a great tool to use for instruction (as I did with this one) or for the teacher to make a movie about something the students are doing in class.
Check out my movie and let me know what you think:
http://stu.westga.edu/~sbloche1/moviemaker